


Pet the Dog

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Gen, Murder, This is what I’m doing for my creative writing class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-24 11:08:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30071334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Pet the Dog - Trope Definition from tvtropes.com:Showing the villain engaging in a moment of kindness, especially towards someone who can't repay them, as a way to humanize or soften them. May or may not involve an actual dog.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 10





	Pet the Dog

**Pet the Dog - Trope Definition from tvtropes.com**

**Showing the villain engaging in a moment of kindness, especially towards someone who can't repay them, as a way to humanize or soften them. May or may not involve an actual dog.**

————-

Alice first hears about the Pet The Dog trope in Creative Writing 101 during her freshman year of college. She’s got this “novel” she’s presenting to the class that’s actually a thinly veiled Newsies fan fiction with the characters’ names changed. One of those characters is a child snatching police officer, and he’s evil as heck. Alice is proud of how evil he is and how every word he says seethes villainy. 

Then, another girl in class puts up her hand. “The bad guy seems kinda... I don’t know. One dimensional? To me?” She twists her teal hair around her finger, looking up at the ceiling as she talks rather than at Alice. 

A boy’s hand shoots up. Everybody has to criticize everybody else’s work or else miss out on class participation points. “Just to piggyback off what Charlotte said, I think the police officer needs a pet the dog moment. He needs to quit twirling his mustache and rescue a puppy or something, to show he’s not all bad.” 

Alice isn’t allowed to argue. That would create an uncomfortable classroom atmosphere. She shifts in her seat. Her face has gone numb. Why has her face gone numb? Her heart keeps doing this uncomfortable squelching thing, like it’s farting blood through her arteries instead of pumping it. She doesn’t ask why anybody would think that rescuing a puppy would be enough to offset evil in a character who literally destroys childhoods. 

————

“Susan Collins hates dogs! Well, that’s what I’m expecting to hear next, from another ridiculous smear campaign.” An old man in a red LL Bean fleece coat smiles at Alice from the TV screen. As he extols the virtues of Maine state senator Susan Collins, a montage of Susan playing with her black lab Pepper plays in background. Susan and Pepper approve this message.

Election Day is approaching. Alice is home from college for the summer. She’s sitting in an antique rocking chair in the living room of her mother’s house in Maine. She just wants to watch mindless sitcoms without being inundated with political commercials. It’s Susan Collins against Sarah Gideon, and who cares what policies Susan is for or against? Susan likes dogs. A vote for Susan is a vote for wholesome frolicking canines, with lolling tongues, wagging tails, and kindness radiating from each strand of shaggy fur. 

“Fuck Susan Collins,” Alice’s mother says, taking a sip of her wine. Alice winces. She doesn’t much like Susan Collins either, but she likes angry voices even less. She always feels like they’re directed at her. 

“Maybe if they said she was a cat person, you’d vote for her,” Alice jokes. She clicks her tongue, trying to lure her mom’s gray cat, Mew Mew, over to her. Mew Mew yawns from her place on the floor. 

“One million cats couldn’t make me vote for a Trump apologist,” Alice’s mom says. Alice agrees, but clearly cute and cuddly animals have got to be enough to sway somebody’s opinion. Why have a commercial about Susan Collins and dogs otherwise? The dog in this commercial isn’t just a dog. It’s a symbol of goodness. 

That night, Alice lies in her childhood bed, with the lights off. She’s only been home from college for a few weeks, but her room is messy, the same way it was when she was a kid. She’s got a vanilla scented candle burning to mask the smell of the half eaten microwave turkey dinner that’s been sitting on her bedside table long enough to congeal. Alice is messy, too. She’s fat and she’s been wearing the same lace dress for two days. Every morning, she spends hours lying in bed thinking about how she has to brush her teeth and not allowing herself to do anything else until she completes that task. It’s like, she wants to do stuff and function, but every step feels like wading through waist deep mud. 

Other than the candle, Alice’s iPad casts the only light in the room. She can see that light  
reflected against her chest as she scrolls through social media. The color of it changes each time she switches between apps. Tonight feels like a good night to torture herself by trying to find pictures of Uncle Richard. He’s not online as far as Alice knows, but three of his four kids are. Michelle and Timmy are both on Facebook, and Robert has a blog. David, the oldest, came back from Iraq sick in the head from what Alice has heard. He doesn’t do the internet. 

Michelle was Alice’s favorite when they were children, so she goes to her Facebook page. Actually, at sixteen, Michelle still is a child, but she’s also a mother. She has newborn named Layla. Alice scrolls through pictures of Michelle and Layla until she finds what she’s looking for— a photo of Uncle Richard holding the baby with a tearful smile that makes the corner of his eyes crinkle. It’s just the way that Uncle Richard looked when he used to bottle feed the puppies he’d rescued. Unfortunately for Layla, she’s not a puppy. She’s a little girl. 

——-

Whatever Alice lacks in writing talent, she makes up for with the prolificness of her words. It’s easy to be prolific on fan fic platforms, because people leave nice comments, and it keeps Alice going. She spends the summer writing a fifty-thousand word fic based on Anne of Green Gables, only in her version of the story a ravaging vampire is attacking the people of Avonlea. Anne’s friend Diana is the first to die, her stomach ripped open by an undead creature who laps up her blood and slurps up her intestines like noodles. 

“This is gonna sound weird,” one reviewer writes, “but would you consider writing a chapter from the vampire’s POV?”

Alice tries, but it comes out like a parody. It’s all like:

_I am a dark creature who slinks darkly, drinking jam-red blood to feed my evil._

Alice blinks at her iPad. She reads the words out loud to herself. Wow do they ever sound dumb. Maybe Charlotte in creative writing was on to something when she said Alice needed to humanize her villains. 

There are a lot of things that Alice could be doing today. It’s eleven AM, and she’s all ready brushed her teeth, but she hasn’t showered this week, and she should probably take a walk. Instead, she’s going to teach herself how to write bad people effectively. She gets up and roots around her desk until she finds a notebook. She opens it and flips past what appear to be Algebra notes from high school. She grabs a pen and writes:

POSITIVE TRAITS OF THE WORST PERSON I KNOW

The letters are big and blocky, conveying a boldness that Alice doesn’t really feel. Back in her creative writing class, listening to her fellow students talk about dogs and dimensions of goodness behind badness had conjured up the specter of Uncle Richard. Well, now Alice is going to use him to her advantage. 

It’s not as hard as it should be to jot down some good things about Richard. Alice writes: 

1\. RESCUED ORPHAN PUPPIES  
2\. RETRAINED ABUSED DOGS  
3\. GAVE DAD A PLACE TO STAY WHEN HE WAS HOMELESS  
4\. HELPED DAD QUIT DRINKING  
5\. GAVE ME MONEY  
6\. GAVE ME CANDY  
7\. GAVE ME THE POWER TO SAY NO

Number seven is important. Alice underlines it and doodles stars around it. She could have said no to Richard, and she never did. Vampires giving people a choice before biting them is something that happens a ton in horror fiction. Could Alice use that in her story? Probably not. Nobody would care how dead Diana was if she was like, “Welcome, creature of the night! Violate me and rip out my entrails!” 

Alice resolves to characterize her good characters down to the tiniest detail and let the evils stay evil. 

————

The summer passes and Alice goes back to school. The fall passes, then the winter, then the spring. It’s summer again, and since Alice’s grades suck, she comes to the conclusion that she should try murder instead of academia. She takes a Greyhound bus from Maine to New York, and the Metro North from New York to Stamford, where Uncle Richard lives. Alice used to live there too. She was only twelve when she moved, but she remembers that she lived in a blue house and Richard’s was green. She checks into a hotel to get used to the environment and plot her next move. 

Time passes.

Alice goes in for the kill.

The green house in Stamford Connecticut is real, but it isn’t actually green. It’s yellow. The peeling paint must’ve always been yellow. No way a new coat of paint could be so faded. Alice swallows back her nausea and squares her shoulders. She walks up the creaky steps to the porch. There’s a splintery hole in the third step, a trap for the unwary. Roxanne, the rottweiler who used to sit on the steps and bare her teeth to warn off those who might enter uninvited, might be long dead. 

Alice knocks on the door. She pats her purse, assessing the reassuring bulk of her newly purchased gun. Nobody comes to the door right away, so Alice knocks again. 

The guy who answers is bony and tall with flaky skin. He smells like beer. 

“Uncle Richard?” The name tastes bad in Alice’s mouth.

“David.”

“Oh.” Alice steps back, really taking in the person before her—his vacant eyes, his shaky hands. He’s decrepit, but there’s no gray in his greasy hair and there are no wrinkles on his face, so he must be young. Of course he’s young. He was born the year before Alice. They used to play together. David is her cousin. Alice takes her hand off the purse. “Is your dad around?” she asks. 

“Uh-huh. Ayup.” David doesn’t question Alice or give any indication as to whether or not he recognizes her. He shuffles off. When he walks he doesn’t lift his feet or swing his arms. When he reaches the stairs Alice half expects him to bump helplessly against the first step and flop over, like a wind-up toy encountering a barrier. Then, his feet rise, and he lurches towards his dad’s second story suite of rooms. Did David move like this when he was a kid? Alice doesn’t think so, but then again, the version of David who she remembers lived in a green house. And there should really be a dog. Richard always had dogs.

As Alice waits, she glances around the street near the house. She’s been in Connecticut for three days now, coming to terms with the realization that the state is much more pastoral and much less sinister than the bursts of images her mind has supplied her with over the years. The sky is blue. It reflects against the glass of the window on the second floor of the house, the one that Alice used to look out. She can remember kneeling by that window, at the age of eleven, stuffing fistfuls of Skittles into her mouth and wondering why the overcast night sky was reddish. The roof of her mouth had been stinging from the sugar, because Richard had bought her almost an entire shopping cart worth of candy, and she’d been eating continuously for hours. Later, Richard would pay her a fee of five dollars to sleep next to him in his bed, with a bonus dollar for every time she kissed him— two dollars, if she let him use his tongue.

Before deciding on blood and crime, Alice had tried cheap online therapy. 

“How did you feel when Richard made you do that?” Madame Virtual Shrink had asked. 

“Bad,” Alice lied.

(In fact, she’d felt the same way she did when she cleaned out Mew Mew’s cat litter box— which was to say, she hadn’t felt much of anything at all. Sure, kissing Richard was gross, especially when he’d gone hard between his legs, but Alice just hadn’t cared. It had happened, and she’d felt nothing.) 

“You didn’t have a choice,” Madame Virtual Shrink had said on another occasion. Alice nodded along, knowing it was a lie. Richard had, on more than one occasion, taken Alice aside and told her that she could ask him to stop any time she wanted and he would. She’d lose the money and the candy, but he wanted her to remember that he’d never forced her into anything. 

“You lack self-confidence,” Alice’s psychologist had asked her during their final meeting. “I want you to describe yourself the way you would a character in one of your stories.” The idea had grossed Alice out so much that she’d hung up on the call. 

Now, as Alice waits for Richard to come down the stairs, she makes a mental list of the qualities a writer could use to humanize her burgeoning killer such as herself:

1\. SHE WRITES (badly)  
2\. SOMETIMES SHE SKIPS MEALS FOR A WEEK SO SHE CAN SPEND THE MONEY ON THEATRE TICKETS  
3\. SHE CAN SING A LITTLE  
4\. NONE OF THIS IS HER FAULT

It’s not a very impressive list. If Alice tells herself that she’s doing this for Layla, her motives seem better, but she’s never met Layla. 

David returns and opens the door. “You can wait inside,” he says. He gestures for Alice to come in. The first floor of the house used to belong to Richard’s elderly mother, but there’s no sign of her today. Maybe she’s gone like Roxanne. David wanders off into one of the downstairs rooms. If Richard’s mother is really dead, then the rooms might be David’s now. 

Alice waits. 

A door opens at the top of the staircase. Something barks, and for the first time Alice is sure she’s in the right place. “It’s okay sweetheart, I’ll be back in a minute,” a male voice coos. The door closes, muffling the yips and barks. Richard walks down the stairs. Alice keeps her hand pressed tight against her gun laden purse. 

The man who appears at the bottom of the steps is thinner than Alice remembers him being, his skin looser. He’s shirtless and wearing black sweatpants coated with moats of white fur. 

“Do you know who I am?” Alice asks. 

“Of course I recognize you, baby. How are you anyways?”

Alice shrugs. “I’m having a rough time, to be honest.”

“Do you...” Richard rakes a hand through his hair. “Do you need anything? I don’t have a lot. Dave’s not doing so great and—” Richard chuckles meekly. “Never mind. Given our history, if you need something, all you have to do is ask.” 

Alice can recognize an offer when she hears it. Maybe, if she agrees to keep her mouth shut and let Richard live his life, he’ll toss some money at her again. 

“I want to show you something,”Alice says. 

She opens her purse. 

Takes the gun out. 

Shoots Richard in the face. 

A cacophony of barking rings out upstairs. Alice covers her face in her hands so she won’t have to look at all the blood. It’s a lot worse in person than it is in fiction. 

A few minutes later, David comes out of his room. He marches up the stairs, opening the door to unleash three fluffy white puppies. The dogs rush over to Richard. Alice guesses that they’re going to mourn or avenge their master, but instead they begin to lap up his blood, stubby tails wagging with each lick. Alice looks up into David’s eyes. 

“Do you need help hiding the body?” David asks.


End file.
